How to identify the training needs of your employees?

Table of contents

1. Set clear goals and expectations for each role
2. Identify the knowledge and skills your company needs
3. Take your employee training to the next level
4. Employee training and Easy LMS

Set clear goals and expectations for each role

Your employees and managers are an excellent resource for learning about their roles in-depth

The first step towards identifying training needs is understanding the skills required for the role. Consider the goals and tasks of the job roles in your company. You need to define what success looks like for each position and what skills this success would require. You’ll want to research their industries to remain updated on changing trends and methods. Your employees and managers are also an excellent resource for learning about their roles in-depth. Once you understand your goals and expectations, share them publicly through HR channels.

Identify the knowledge and skills your company needs 

Types of knowledge and skills 

There are different types of skills: technical skills and soft skills.

1. Technical qualifications or hard skills refer to someone's understanding and ability to apply technical knowledge in the workplace [1].
2. Soft skillsare a combination of social skills, communication skills, and personality traits. They enable people to navigate their work environment successfully.

To be a successful trainer, you must identify gaps in both these types of skills.

Talk with your employees

Each employee has a unique learning style

Each employee has a unique learning style, work style, and personality. That may sound obvious, but it's something that many companies disregard when upskilling their employees. Dealing with different people the same way can hinder progress.

Since each employee is unique, understanding their knowledge gaps is complex. Due to the complexity, the best way to discover what your employees need is to speak to them. This can be done formally through in-depth conversations with your employees and their directing managers. Or, you could also talk with their colleagues for a peer review.

Assess employees' skill levels with exams and surveys

However, in this technological world, decisions are made fast and more people work remotely. Applying surveys and personality tests are good alternatives for learning about your employees in these circumstances.

Giving smart personality tests to your team, including managers, can help identify their different styles. Remember to ask questions to learn about how they perceive themselves and your organization. The results may surprise you.

A less time-consuming method is testing their knowledge level. For that, you can create an online test with questions that cover various aspects of their job. Then you can analyze their results.

Seeing where the group struggled to answer helps you identify areas that need more attention and training. It's also possible to benchmark your results against other companies in the same industry to see how your staff compare to their peers.

Take your employee training to the next level

Once you discover what your employees need to learn, you must address these gaps with training. The best training will consist of three elements: mentorship and coaching, training material, and monitoring progress.

1. Mentor and coach employees

Mentorship provides hands-on training and is effective due to its focus on individual needs. Although it is time-intensive, it is a great way to learn how to complete complex processes like operating machinery.

Coaching is a method where a senior employee provides guidance and training to a more junior colleague. It is also a hands-on approach but the junior employees have a specific personal goal in mind. It is also ideal for improving soft skills like leadership.

2. Create training material

Online training allows you to create content that your employees can take asynchronously

After identifying the knowledge and skills your company needs, you can create training material tailored to your employees' needs. Online training allows you to create content that your employees can take asynchronously. Online training is easy to set up and comes with many benefits, but you should also explore if it is a suitable method for your company.

3. Monitor performance

Throughout the process, you can evaluate performance and assess how it changes over time. We provide in-depth advice on tracking performance and analyzing results in our article about how to track your employee’s training easily.

Employee training and Easy LMS

With Easy LMS, you can easily create Exams to identify gaps in your participants' technical knowledge. It's possible to set up a pass rate and issue certificates automatically for those who pass. Set up notification emails and get informed every time someone completes an Exam.

Take back control over your e-learning strategy with Easy LMS

With Assessments, you can create personality tests and surveys that let you learn more about your employees' soft skills. You can also discover what their learning style is.

Finally, use all this information to create beautiful Courses that combine text, images, video, and audio files that cater to all learning styles. Create a training Academy and publish all your courses there. Easy!

Our robust reporting features allow you to have an overview of the learning material. See when your users started and ended their training and how long it took them. You can also see what the most challenging and easiest questions were.

You can take back control over your e-learning strategy 💪. It's just a few clicks away.

Useful resources

1. Wikipedia

Frequently Asked Questions